Love on the Rocks: Lighthouses in Literature as Gendered Geographies of Love

Abstract

The lighthouse has long been a familiar setting for stories of love, conflict, and epiphany. That isolated tower on the clifftop brims with symbolic possibility and sometimes cliché, positioning it as a site of gendered love, with popular fiction titles embedding the trope of the contained world revolving, like the lit lamp, around the male authority. But the lighthouse also has an explicit historical situatedness. The nineteenth century British lighthouses, in particular, were seen as outposts of empire. They are immovable inscriptions of the outlines of islands, the edges of continents – the imprint of colonisation on country. And they are often seen as male domains. In the popular imagination, a lighthouse is much more than its function. Does recent historical fiction perpetuate or subvert what we think we know about lighthouses and the people who populated them? How does it portray the officially gendered roles and intense relationships of women characters? How might historical novels set in settler colonies recognise the specific meaning of the lighthouse as a marker of imperial authority? And how do we read the lighthouse and its place in the imagination as a geography of gender and love?